Man-Devil: The Mind and Times of Bernard
Mandeville, the Wickedest Man in Europe
(Princeton, 2025) concerns the scandal that
broke in London in 1723 over Bernard
Mandeville's notorious work The Fable of the Bees. In this work, I explore not just the context of the scandal, but Bernard Mandeville's thought more generally. I discuss his intellectual heritage, especially his medical theory, his account of 'animal spirits' that govern human beings, and his concern with human beings' animal nature generally. I then discuss Mandeville's major works on medicine and mental illness, his dialogues on sexual morality, his poetry and his political pamphlets - as well of course as The Fable of the Bees itself.
Although the book is aimed at a wide audience (in keeping with Mandeville's own literary preferences) I argue for some distinct theses regarding the medical and political context of his thought, as well as with regard to the philosophical pressures that led him to develop his theory in The Fable of the Bees Part II. I argue that Mandeville has ahead of his time, that he developed the rudiments of a theory of ideology and false consciousness, and that at the heart of his innovations was a commitment to a naturalistic account of human beings as creatures who have evolved with an inherent tendency to self-deception, a tendency that could be utilised to explain an enormous range of social behaviour. It is an uncomfortable picture of human beings, one that Mandeville thought - so I claim - could only be presented to them indirectly through satire.
The first chapter of Man-Devil has been excerpted in the The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Man-Devil has been reviewed here:
The Spectator
Literary Review
History Today
David Wootton has Man-Devil as one of his Books of the Year in Engelsberg Ideas:
"Mandeville is in many ways the most important moral and social theorist of the eighteenth century. He asked two questions: a) How does society function if we are indeed selfish creatures? and b) How did selfish creatures domesticate themselves to make social life possible? One can evade these questions if one denies that human beings are fundamentally selfish, but then it becomes very difficult to explain what motivates our behaviour. The respectable Enlightenment — Hume, Smith, Hutcheson — and the radical Enlightenment — Rousseau — struggled to come to terms with Mandeville, and so have historians of moral philosophy and social theory ever since. What made him so problematic is that he chose to write in a wickedly playful style, so that it is often difficult to know just which of his claims are serious and which are primarily intended to cause shock and dismay. John Callanan’s Man-Devil: The Mind and Times of Bernard Mandeville, the Wickedest Man in Europe (Princeton University Press) is by far the best discussion we have of this paradoxical, and immensely influential thinker, and everyone interested in the history of moral, social, or economic theorising should read it."
Some advance praise for Man-Devil:
“John Callanan's enjoyable account of Mandeville explains clearly both why the author of The Fable of the Bees was notorious in his own day and why major figures such as Hume, Rousseau, and Smith felt the need to engage with him so closely. It tells the reader what we know about Mandeville's life, and explores the full range of Mandeville's writings. Mandeville's ideas are put in context, but are also brought to philosophical life. This is the best account in English of Mandeville’s thought as a whole.”—James Harris, University of St Andrews
“This is the book on Mandeville I’ve long hoped for, and it is even better than I could have hoped. It is beautifully and engagingly written, as befitting a book on a great, extremely funny—not a common virtue of philosophers—and often scurrilous prose stylist. The Mandeville which emerges in Callanan’s book is provocative and subtle, a humane exponent of Terence’s dictum “nothing human is alien to me” but also a sharp-witted critic of hypocrisy possessing a medical remove from which to examine our paradoxical species.”—Aaron Garrett, Boston University
“Bernard Mandeville was one of the most controversial writers of early eighteenth-century England, famed for coining the paradox ‘private vices, publick benefits’ as the subtitle to his major work, The Fable of the Bees. While John Callanan never loses sight of this satirical, even mischievous, bent, he convincingly shows the reader why Mandeville became such an influential figure in eighteenth-century thought, taken up by David Hume and Adam Smith among others. Well-researched and original in its approach, his book is highly recommended.”—Malcolm Jack, historian and Mandeville scholar
“Mandeville is the first great social theorist, and everyone who comes after him—Rousseau, Smith, Marx, Hayek—is deeply in his debt. But he is slippery and paradoxical. John Callanan at last makes Mandeville’s core doctrine clear and brings out his continuing importance for understanding human beings as sociable animals. This is an important, long-needed book.”—David Wootton, author of Power, Pleasure, and Profit: Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison
“Callanan sensibly and sensitively places the infamous Fable of the Bees in the wider context of Mandeville’s other writings and intellectual context and, thereby, illuminates him as a diagnostician of human self-concealment and satirist of human pride. He reveals the Dutch physician with a successful London medical practice as an original pilferer of other people’s useful ideas and with a relish for the urbane. And for those who recognize a good bargain when they are offered one, this book also instructs in the art of living, even points the way to the path of wisdom.”—Eric Schliesser, author of Adam Smith: Systematic Philosopher and Public Thinker
“John Callanan’s Man-Devil strikes a balance between a ‘forensic’ investigation of Mandeville's engagement with reactions to his ideas in his own time and an examination of the Mandevillean tendency to cross disciplinary boundaries and enrich contemporary controversies in human and social sciences. ‘Nothing human is alien’ to Mandeville, including the human animal’s wondrous potential of being in denial about its own bottomless self-deception.”—Spyridon Tegos, University of Crete
